INVESTIGATION OF POLITENESS STRATEGIES

Politeness is a strategy functioning to show respect to the interlocutor, as well as to express certain intentions without directly violating politeness norms. In the context of complaints, politeness strategies are used to form certain meaning constructions intended by customers. This article aims to identify the types of complaints and politeness strategies used by English and Turkish speakers on the Internet. This study employs a qualitative research design with an interpretation approach to data in the form of written utterances. The data sources are phrases and sentences in Turkish and English. Data were collected from two websites designed for English complaints and Turkish complaints. The data collection technique was by making corpus data entries with the limitation of criteria of clothing, home appliances, and beverage companies. The number of data selected for the data corpus was 100 complaints from each website. The data were analyzed by identifying the types of politeness strategies and types of complaints that emerged from the speech used by complainers in English and Turkish. The classified data is then further interpreted in the context of low and high culture, and the findings are presented in the form of differences in the use of strategies by English and Turkish customers. The results of the data analysis and interpretation show significant differences between English-speaking customers and Turkish-speaking customers in the use of politeness strategies to give complaints. These contrasting differences are strongly influenced by cultural factors and the culture of the speakers of a language. Further investigation has been carried out in discussion and the importance of politeness strategies in English language teaching context were explained.